Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

by John Berendt

  Williams gave no outward sign that he was at all embarrassed by the human tornado that had just passed through his house.

  “Danny has two distinct personalities,” he said. “He can switch from one to the other like turning the pages of a book.” Williams was speaking about Danny with calm detachment, just as he had spoken earlier about the Waterford crystal chandelier in the dining room, the portrait by Jeremiah Theus in the parlor, and the judge’s son and the gangster’s moll. But he did not address the most curious question of all: Danny’s presence in Mercer House and the fact that he apparently had the run of it. The incongruity was startling. Perhaps it registered on my face, because Williams offered something of an explanation.

  “I have hypoglycemia,” he said, “and lately I’ve been blacking out. Danny stays here sometimes to baby-sit me when I’m not feeling well.”

  It may have been the Madeira, or the atmosphere of frankness that Williams had inspired with his stories—at any rate, I felt free to observe that blacking out alone might be preferable to having this person running loose in the house. Williams laughed. “Actually, I think Danny may be improving a little.”

  “Improving? Over what?”

  “Two weeks ago, we had a similar scene, but it ended a bit more dramatically. Danny was agitated that time because his best friend had made a disparaging remark about his car, and his girlfriend had refused to marry him. Danny came back to the house and carried on about it, and before I knew what was happening, he had stomped a small table, thrown a bronze lamp against the wall, and slammed a cut-glass water pitcher on the floor with so much force it made a permanent imprint on the heart-pine floorboards. But he wasn’t through yet. He took one of my German Lugers and fired a bullet into the floor upstairs. Then he ran out the front door and fired another shot into Monterey Square, trying to knock out a streetlight.

  “Naturally, I called the police. But when Danny heard the sirens, he tossed the gun into the bushes, ran indoors, flew up the stairs, and jumped into bed with all his clothes on. The cops were no more than a minute behind him, but by the time they got upstairs, Danny was pretending to be fast asleep. When they ‘woke’ him, he put on an act of confusion and denied he’d broken anything or shot any guns. But the police noticed tiny drops of blood on his arms from the little splinters of glass that had shot up when he smashed the pitcher on the floor. So they took him off to jail. I figured the longer I left him there the madder he’d get, so the next morning I dropped the charges and got him out.”

  I did not ask the obvious question: Why do you have anything to do with him? Instead, I asked a question of more immediate concern: “You said Danny had fired ‘one of’ your German Lugers. How many do you have?”

  “Several,” said Williams. “I need them for security. I’m here by myself a lot, and I’ve had a couple of robberies. The second robbery was pulled off by a man who was armed with a submachine gun, and I was asleep upstairs at the time. That’s when I installed the alarm system. It works fine when I’m out of the house or upstairs, but I can’t throw the switch when I’m walking around down here on the main floor, because it’ll summon the police. So I keep pistols in strategic places. There’s a Luger in the rear library, another in a desk drawer in my office, a third in the Irish linen press in the hall, and a Smith and Wesson in the living room. I’ve also got a shotgun and three or four rifles upstairs. The pistols are loaded.”

  “That’s four loaded pistols,” I said.

  “There’s a risk, I know. But I’m a gambler. I have been all my life. You have to be if you deal in antiques and restore houses and go into debt for all of it as I have. But when I gamble I know how to improve the odds. Come, I’ll show you.”

  Williams led me over to a small backgammon table. He removed the backgammon board and replaced it with another plain board lined with green felt.

  “I believe in mind control,” he said. “I think you can influence events by mental concentration. I’ve invented a game called Psycho Dice. It’s very simple. You take four dice and call out four numbers between one and six—for example, a four, a three, and two sixes. Then you throw the dice, and if any of your numbers come up, you leave those dice standing on the board. You continue to roll the remaining dice until all the dice are sitting on the board, showing your set of numbers. You’re eliminated if you roll three times in succession without getting any of the numbers you need. The object is to get all four numbers in the fewest rolls.”

  Williams was sure he could improve the odds by sheer concentration. “Dice have six sides,” he said, “so you have a one-in-six chance of getting your number when you throw them. If you do any better than that, you beat the law of averages. Concentration definitely helps. That’s been proved. Back in the nineteen-thirties, Duke university did a study with a machine that could throw dice. First they had it throw dice when nobody was in the building, and the numbers came up strictly according to the law of averages. Then they put a man in the next room and had him concentrate on various numbers to see if that would beat the odds. It did. Then they put him in the same room, still concentrating, and the machine beat the odds again, by an even wider margin. When the man rolled the dice himself, using a cup, he did better still. When he finally rolled the dice with his bare hand, he did best of all.”

  From the few rounds we played, I could not say whether Psycho Dice really worked. Williams had no doubt that it did. He saw proof of it at every turn. When I needed a five and rolled a two, he proclaimed, “Aha! You know what’s on the other side of a two, don’t you? Five!”

  I could not let this pass. “If we’d been betting, I would have lost anyway, wouldn’t I?”

  “Yes, but look how close you came. You see, the same concentration that makes Psycho Dice work can make most things in life work. I’ve never been sick a day in my life except for a common cold once in a while. I just can’t be bothered. I don’t have the time. Being sick is a luxury. I concentrate on being well. Danny didn’t do more than let off steam tonight, because I cooled him down. I was concentrating on that.”

  I was tempted not to let that remark pass, either. But it was late. I rose to leave. “Isn’t it possible that other people will turn their mental energy on you?” I asked.

  “They try to all the time,” Williams said with a wry smile. “I’m told a lot of people pray fervently night after night that I’ll invite them to my Christmas parties.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, it’s the best party in Savannah.”

  “I’ll invite you to the next one, and you can judge for yourself.” Williams fixed me with an impenetrable look. “You know I have two Christmas parties, not just one. Both are black-tie. The first party is the famous one. It’s the one that gets written up in the newspapers, the one the high and mighty of Savannah come to. The second party is the next night. It’s the one the papers never write about. It’s … for gentlemen only. Which party would you like to be invited to?”

  “The one,” I said, “least likely to involve gunfire.”

  Chapter 2

  DESTINATION UNKNOWN

  It would be stretching things to say that I had left New York and come to Savannah as a result of eating a paillard of veal served on a bed of wilted radicchio. But there is a connection.

  I had lived in New York for twenty years, writing and editing for magazines. Thomas Carlyle once said that magazine work is below street-sweeping as a trade, but in mid-twentieth-century New York it was a reasonably respectable calling. I wrote for Esquire and had served as editor of New York magazine. At any rate, in the early 1980s it happened that New York City had embarked on a nouvelle cuisine eating binge. Every week, two or three elegant new restaurants would open to great fanfare. The décor would be sleek postmodern, the food superlative, and the prices steep. Dining out became the most popular leisure activity in town; it replaced going to discotheques, the theater, and concerts. Talk of food and restaurants dominated conversations. One evening, as a waiter at one of
these places was reciting a lengthy monologue of specials, I scanned the prices of entrées on the menu—$19, $29, $39, $49—and it occurred to me that I had seen that very same column of figures earlier in the day. But where? It suddenly came to me. I had seen it in a newspaper ad for supersaver airfares from New York to cities all across America. As I recall, the veal-and-radicchio entrée cost as much as a flight from New York to Louisville or any of six equidistant cities. With everything included—drinks, dessert, coffee, and tip—the bill for each person that night came to what it would have cost to spend a three-day weekend in another town.

  A week later I passed up the veal and radicchio and flew to New Orleans.

  After that, every five or six weeks I took advantage of the newly deregulated airfares and flew out of New York in the company of a small group of friends interested in a change of scene. One of those weekend jaunts took us to Charleston, South Carolina. We drove around in a rented car with a map lying open on the front seat. At the bottom of the map, about a hundred miles down the coast, lay Savannah.

  I had never been to Savannah, but I had a vivid image of it anyway. Several images, in fact. The most memorable, because it was formed in my childhood, was one associated with Treasure Island, which I had read at the age of ten. In Treasure Island, Savannah is the place where Captain John Flint, the murderous pirate with the blue face, has died of rum before the story begins. It is on his deathbed in Savannah that Flint bellows his last command—“Fetch aft the rum, Darby!”—and hands Billy Bones a map of Treasure Island. “He gave it me at Savannah,” says Bones, “when he lay a-dying.” The book had a drawing of Flint’s map in it with an X marking the location of his buried treasure. I turned to the map again and again as I read, and every time I did I was reminded of Savannah, for there at the bottom was Billy Bones’s scrawled notation, “Given by above JF to Mr W. Bones. Savannah this twenty July 1754.”

  I next came across Savannah in Gone with the Wind, which was set a century later. By 1860, Savannah was no longer the pirates’ rendezvous I’d pictured. It had become, in Margaret Mitchell’s words, “that gently mannered city by the sea.” Savannah was an offstage presence in Gone with the Wind, just as it had been in Treasure Island. It stood aloof on the Georgia coast—dignified, sedate, refined—looking down its nose at Atlanta, which was then a twenty-year-old frontier town three hundred miles inland. From Atlanta’s point of view, specifically through the eyes of the young Scarlett O’Hara, Savannah and Charleston were “like aged grandmothers fanning themselves placidly in the sun.”

  My third impression of Savannah was somewhat quirkier. I got it from the yellowed pages of an old newspaper that had been used to line the inside of an antique wooden chest that I kept at the foot of my bed. It was from the Savannah Morning News, April 2, 1914. Whenever I lifted the lid of the chest, I was confronted by a brief story that read as follows:

  TANGO IS NO SIGN OF INSANITY, HOLDS JURY

  DECIDES THAT SADIE JEFFERSON IS NOT INSANE

  It is no indication of insanity to tango. This was settled yesterday by a lunacy commission which decided that Sadie Jefferson is sane. It was alleged the woman tangoed all the way to police headquarters recently when she was arrested.

  That was the story in its entirety. Sadie Jefferson was not further identified, and nothing was said about why she had been arrested in the first place. I imagined she had drunk more than her share of the rum left over from Captain Flint. Whatever it was, Sadie Jefferson seemed to be cut from the same cloth as the heroine of the song “Hard-hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah.” Those two women lent an exotic dimension to the picture of Savannah that was forming in my mind.

  Then Johnny Mercer died in the mid-1970s, and I read that he had been born and raised in Savannah. Mercer had written the lyrics and sometimes also the music for dozens of songs I’d known since childhood, gentle songs that had a mellow eloquence: “Jeepers Creepers,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” “Blues in the Night,” “One for My Baby,” “Goody Goody,” “Fools Rush In,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Dream,” “Laura,” “Satin Doll,” “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

  According to his obituary, Mercer had never lost touch with his hometown. Savannah, he said, had been “a sweet, indolent background for a boy to grow up in.” Even after he moved away, he kept a home on the outskirts of town so he could visit whenever he wanted. The back porch of his house looked out on a tidal creek that meandered through a broad expanse of marshland. In his honor, Savannah had renamed the creek after one of the four Academy Award-winning songs for which he’d written the lyrics, “Moon River.”

  These, then, were the images in my mental gazetteer of Savannah: rum-drinking pirates, strong-willed women, courtly manners, eccentric behavior, gentle words, and lovely music. That and the beauty of the name itself: Savannah.

  On Sunday, my traveling companions went back to New York, but I stayed on in Charleston. I had decided to drive down to Savannah, spend the night, and fly back to New York from there.

  There being no direct route to Savannah from Charleston, I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flat-lands of the South Carolina low country. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees. There was an occasional produce stand by the side of the road and a few cottages set into the foliage, but nothing resembling urban sprawl. The voice on the car radio informed me that I had entered a zone called the Coastal Empire. “The weather outlook for the Coastal Empire,” it said, “is for highs in the mid-eighties, with moderate seas and a light chop on inland waters.”

  Abruptly, the trees gave way to an open panorama of marsh grass the color of wheat. Straight ahead, a tall bridge rose steeply out of the plain. From the top of the bridge, I looked down on the Savannah River and, on the far side, a row of old brick buildings fronted by a narrow esplanade. Behind the buildings a mass of trees extended into the distance, punctuated by steeples, cornices, rooftops, and cupolas. As I descended from the bridge, I found myself plunging into a luxuriant green garden.

  Walls of thick vegetation rose up on all sides and arched overhead in a lacy canopy that filtered the light to a soft shade. It had just rained; the air was hot and steamy. I felt enclosed in a semitropical terrarium, sealed off from a world that suddenly seemed a thousand miles away.

  The streets were lined with townhouses of brick and stucco, handsome old buildings with high front stoops and shuttered windows. I entered a square that had flowering shrubs and a monument at the center. A few blocks farther on, there was another square. Up ahead, I could see a third on line with this one, and a fourth beyond that. To the left and right, there were two more squares. There were squares in every direction. I counted eight of them. Ten. Fourteen. Or was it twelve?

  “There are exactly twenty-one squares,” an elderly lady told me later in the afternoon. Her name was Mary Harty. Acquaintances in Charleston had put us in touch; she had been expecting me. She had white hair and arched eyebrows that gave her a look of permanent surprise. We stood in her kitchen while she mixed martinis in a silver shaker. When she was finished, she put the shaker into a wicker basket. She was going to take me on an excursion, she said. It was too nice a day, and I had too little time in Savannah for us to waste it indoors.

  As far as Miss Harty was concerned, the squares were the jewels of Savannah. No other city in the world had anything like them. There were five on Bull Street, five on Barnard, four on Abercorn, and so on. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, had been responsible for them, she said. He had decided Savannah was going to be laid out with squares, based on the design of a Roman military encampment, even before he set sail from England—before he even knew exactly where on the map he was going to put Savannah. When he arrived in February 1733, he chose a site for the city on top of a forty-foot bluff on the southern bank of the Savannah River, eighteen miles inland from the Atlantic. He had already sketched out the
plans. The streets were to be laid out in a grid pattern, crossing at right angles, and there would be squares at regular intervals. In effect, the city would become a giant parterre garden. Oglethorpe built the first four squares himself. “The thing I like best about the squares,” Miss Harty said, “is that cars can’t cut through the middle; they must go around them. So traffic is obliged to flow at a very leisurely pace. The squares are our little oases of tranquillity.”

  As she spoke, I recognized in her voice the coastal accent described in Gone with the Wind—“soft and slurring, liquid of vowels, kind to consonants.”

  “But actually,” she said, “the whole of Savannah is an oasis. We are isolated. Gloriously isolated! We’re a little enclave on the coast—off by ourselves, surrounded by nothing but marshes and piney woods. We’re not easy to get to at all, as you may have noticed. If you fly here, you usually have to change planes at least once. And trains are not much better. Somebody wrote a novel in the nineteen-fifties that captured it rather well, I thought. The View from Pompey’s Head. It’s by Hamilton Basso. Have you read it? The story opens with a young man taking the train from New York to Pompey’s Head and having to get off at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. Pompey’s Head is supposed to be Savannah, and I have no quibble with that. We’re a terribly inconvenient destination!”

  Miss Harty’s laughter was as light as wind chimes. “There used to be a train that ran between here and Atlanta. The Nancy Hanks. It shut down altogether twenty years ago, and we don’t miss it at all.”

  “Don’t you feel cut off?” I asked.

  “Cut off from what?” she replied. “No, on the whole I’d say we rather enjoy our separateness. Whether that’s good or bad I haven’t any idea. Manufacturers tell us they like to test-market their products in Savannah—toothpastes and detergents and the like—because Savannah is utterly impervious to outside influence. Not that people haven’t tried to influence us! Good Lord, they try all the time. People come here from all over the country and fall in love with Savannah. Then they move here and pretty soon they’re telling us how much more lively and prosperous Savannah could be if we only knew what we had and how to take advantage of it. I call these people ‘Gucci carpetbaggers.’ They can be rather insistent, you know. Even rude. We smile pleasantly and we nod, but we don’t budge an inch. Cities all around us are booming urban centers: Charleston, Atlanta, Jacksonville—but not Savannah. The Prudential Insurance people wanted to locate their regional headquarters here in the nineteen-fifties. It would have created thousands of jobs and made Savannah an important center of a nice, profitable, non-polluting industry. But we said no. Too big. They gave it to Jacksonville instead. In the nineteen-seventies, Gian Carlo Menotti considered making Savannah the permanent home for his Spoleto U.S.A. Festival. Again, we were not interested. So Charleston got it. It’s not that we’re trying to be difficult. We just happen to like things exactly the way they are!”